


What's in a Name?

by PseudoLeigha



Series: Mary Potter Shorts/Background [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adulting is hard, Baby Names, Character sketches, Married Life, Mary Potter background, Pureblood Traditions, Two Shot, culture clash, jily, paternalistic!James, petty!Lily, self-involved!Lily, too young to be parents, tradition, trying to be responsible adults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 15:02:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6525004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the naming of Harry/Mary Potter. Two-shot: Lily reflects on her own name and the process of naming her child (humor); James reflects on the importance of tradition (life and responsibility). Lily is kind of petty and self-involved; James is kind of paternalistic. Both have clearly been missing the other's point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What's in a Name?

Early July, 1980

Lily’s POV

* * *

Lily – Lily Irene Evans Potter – always thought of herself as Lily Evans, even after she was married – she hadn’t yet been married for a year, after all. Only her husband and their solicitor and the goblins at the bank ever called her (Lady) Lily Potter.

She didn’t particularly like her name. She didn’t particularly _dislike_ it, either.

In the muggle world, her first name, just Lily, was relatively unique, if a bit ‘hippy’ to suit her. (Not that she had anything against the hippies, but she was a fighter, not a lover, when push came to shove, as she had glibly told her girlfriends, on more than one occasion. They never believed her, not for the longest time.)

In the wizarding world, it was rather common – short for Lilith, which was popular with the darker Old Families, and Lilian, which was equally popular with the moderately progressive set. There were even a fair number of families who, like her father’s family, never let go of the Victorian fashion for flower names. In a way, she was lucky, that her name did not automatically single her out as clearly muggleborn (or at least, not the Lily part). There was a pureblood Violette Rosier in her class, and Narcissa Black in the year above.

But her first thought whenever she heard it, ever since she was small, and their mother showed her and Petunia the flowers that were their namesake, was of the little, bell-like Lilies of the Valley, that grew down by the river, or the classic funereal Calla Lilies, and to be frank, they just weren’t her style.

It wasn’t until she was planning her wedding that she realized lilies came in any color but white. Lilies that looked like they were on fire? Those she could get behind.

The _Irene_ part was a little better. She liked the way the syllables rolled off the tongue, especially when it was pronounced the Irish way, _ĭ-RĒ-nē,_ instead of _ī- RĒN_. But it was, she knew, derived from the name of a Greek goddess of peace, and she wasn’t terribly certain how well that suited, either.

It might have done, in school, when she took pains to hide behind a slew of masks, always showing the right face to the right people and keeping everyone improbably pleased with the Lily Evans they thought they knew. Now, though, after almost two years on the front lines of the War, widely acknowledged as the most ruthless fighter among the light?

Sev always thought it fit, though, because _ĭ-RĒ-nē_ sounds an awful lot like _irony_ , and that suited her to a tee. Still does. After all, she’s a Healer by trade, and she’s killed more men than half the Death Eaters.

The only part of her name that she loved, the part that always suited her, was Evans.

She loved it even though it was common as mud, and marked her out as such in the wizarding world. She thought it was a dependable sort of name. You could count on an Evans, whether to back you in a fight or follow through on their promises.

She knew she could be manipulative and cruel and at times a bit… off, but she always came through in the end. If she said she would do something, she did (even if she had to use Black Arts to do it– all was fair in love and war, and she was most assuredly at war).

Her friends had grown up with her and fought alongside her calling her Evans. The Dark Lord and his lieutenants knew her as Evans, like Bella Black was still a Black, even though she’d been married to Lestrange much longer than Lily was married to James. Even her husband, proud as he was to label her ‘Potter’ after eight years’ pursuit, still used her maiden more often than not, the habit of their Hogwarts years not easily broken.

She’d always thought that if she someday had a son, she’d like to call him Evan. Jamie could choose the middle name, but she wanted Evan.

That was why the Lord and Lady Potter, locked up in hiding, for the safety of their unborn child (one of two the Headmaster thought might be able to fulfill a certain prophecy and end the Dark Lord’s reign of terror), were refusing to speak to one another, despite the lack of alternative conversationalists.

Firstly, it had to be noted that Lily refused to allow James to determine the sex of the child via magic. James thought this was a stupid, mugglish decision, but he was willing to give his very pregnant wife nearly anything she wanted.

 _Nearly_ , because while they had found it easy enough to settle on a girl’s name (Mary Elizabeth, which followed the Potters’ naming traditions, while honoring Lily’s mother as well. Mary Victoria had been a close second, but they had decided that was too much like laying claim to the prophecy), the stubborn man was utterly unwilling to compromise on a boy’s name.

The Potters named their children after royals – James, Charles, Henry, George, Edward – and always passed down the father’s name to the first-born son. Jamie was particularly enamored of Harry (not Henry or Harold or Harrison, _just_ Harry, which Lily, her own given name a common diminutive, _hated_ ). He wanted his son to be named Harry James Potter.

Not Evan Henry or Evan James or Fredrick (after her father) or Charles (after James’) or any variation thereof. Lily, though she was pregnant and thought James Charles Potter owed whatever she damn well asked for, because she was giving him a child in the first place, in the middle of a freaking war, and they had to be insane – but she digressed… _she_ , despite her reputation as one of the most stubborn girls Hogwarts had ever seen and her current indelicate condition, had offered a _compromise_ , after the first month of debate: She would accept Evan as the _middle_ name. She would simply ignore whatever stupid name James chose for the first bit, even _Harry_.

James would have none of it. It was Harry James, he said, or nothing.

Lily had leapt upon that linguistic slip-up immediately, declaring that Anomos Evan Potter sounded like a perfectly wizarding name to her. (Evan Anomos sounded even better.) Or Outis, the classic Greek pun. Odysseus was a king in Ithaca, after all.

James was not amused.

Pity, she actually quite liked Niemand. Evan Niemand Potter? It could work.

James’ counter-proposal was that he should name a boy, while Lily could choose any name she wanted for a girl. Lily had rejected _that_ compromise because she had already grown quite fond of Mary Elizabeth, and James had had significant input into that choice, so it wouldn’t be fair, because she didn’t want to change it.

Besides, there was every chance that if she did take the offer, and went with something like _Marigold_ to suit her own family’s traditions, it would violate James’ naming sensibilities anyway. He could be betting that she liked Mary Elizabeth too much to change it, but she thought it was _far_ more likely he had done the charm to check the baby’s sex while she was sleeping, and _knew_ that it was a boy. (No matter what Minnie said, pregnancy had _not_ made her more paranoid – just less willing to put in the effort to hide it.)

So they were at an impasse, and she suspected that her husband of eleven months had done the one thing she _expressly_ forbid him to do, and was trying to use it to leverage her into a bad deal, which was why they were currently not speaking.

But it had been three days, and they were in hiding with no one else to talk to, and they were, admittedly, running out of time to pick _something_. She found her resolve weakening under the pressure of her husband’s stubbornness and her own hormones. It could be _so_ much worse, after all. He could be fighting for something _incredibly dumb_ , like James Remus Potter, or Serious Peter Potter (she wouldn’t put it past the Marauders to name at least _one_ of their children with a reverse-Sirius pun).

In the grand scheme of things, Harry James was not so bad.

But she would be damned if she was going to break the silence first, just to tell _him_ that.


	2. Flip Side

Early July, 1980

James’ POV

* * *

James sighed dramatically, even though there was no one around to see, flopping into an armchair in the study to stare at a pile of letters he didn’t care to answer and wonder when Lily was going to talk to him again. Then he wondered, and not for the first time, if he had done the right thing, marrying a muggleborn.

He loved her. He did. He always had, or thought he did, in the back of his mind. Even in that last year and a half of Hogwarts, when he hadn’t had the time or energy or inclination to chase after her anymore, if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he loved her. But no one did. His parents had died, and he had had to put aside childish things. He supposed they all thought they were doing him a favor, not-bringing-up his fruitless juvenile courtship.

The crush he’d had on Lily at Hogwarts was, most definitely, a childish infatuation. But since seventh year, they’d become friends. They’d fought together. She’d saved his life half a dozen times or more, and he had done the same. He knew her now as a person, not just as an object of affection, and his love was that of an adult for an equal, not a child for the one thing he can’t have. And now, the light of his life was married to him, and less than a month away from bearing his child. He was equal parts excited, terrified, and overwhelmed. He wished she could just get past this stupid name thing.

He forgot, sometimes, that there was so much she didn’t know about him and his world. She was so good at magic, and even better at blending in. She had done an absolutely _amazing_ job learning their bonding ceremony (no one would have guessed, if they didn’t know her, that she wasn’t a proper prospect for the young Lord Potter). And after all these years, she hardly ever referenced anything unfamiliar about the muggle world.

But some days – like the last three – it was painfully clear that she didn’t have, and never would have, the same sense of tradition that he (and every other pureblood) took for granted. And for all he (and his parents, before their deaths) supported the advancement and inclusion of muggleborns in their society, he _did_ appreciate tradition, in a way that someone who didn’t even know her great-grandparents’ _names_ really couldn’t.

There wasn’t anything _wrong_ with the name ‘Evan,’ but part of being a Potter, part of having a lineage that stretched back hundreds of years – even if it seemed rather ridiculous – was being able to look back at the Tapestry and find all the ancestors with your name. It wasn’t about the name itself, but about the history and continuity it represented. It was important to James for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate even to himself that his son, his _heir_ , should follow the traditions that the Potters had established over the last five-hundred years.

Unfortunately, every time James tried to explain that, Lily immediately countered by asking why her family shouldn’t be equally honored in their child’s name. She didn’t understand the pressure that had been heaped on James’ shoulders since the age of seven, to marry and continue the family name. Girls simply didn’t have that expectation to live up to.

He had never told her that that night in the field hospital, when they didn’t know if he was going to live or die, that in his deluded fever-dreams, he had spoken with his father’s shade. The old man had been so disappointed in James. Not for fighting for what they both believed was right – The Dark and its false Lord could not be allowed to destroy Magical Britain, torturing and killing without consequence – but for failing to marry and sire an heir.

That was the reason he had, in a brief moment of clarity, asked the only woman he had ever loved to marry him, yet again, despite the fact he had no idea whether he was going to live through the night, and no hope of her accepting the offer. That was the reason he was so eager to know the sex of the poor unborn child: the Potter clan were patrilineal, and in these uncertain times, a male heir was their best hope of securing the name for another generation. Not that a daughter couldn’t inherit, but everything would be vastly more complicated for a girl-child.

If it were up to him, they would simply adopt a likely boy – the war was creating more orphans every day. But the Potter Family Magic, which directed the inheritance, called for an heir _born_ into the House. The magic had been tied to the blood and the name of the family since its inception, with the marriage of Ignotius Peverell’s thrice-great granddaughter to a muggleborn Potter in 1468. They were one of the oldest pureblood houses with such an inheritance restriction in place.

The Blacks and Bones were twice as old, of course, but they allowed for blood adoption and simple magical adoption respectively to carry on the name. Longbottom, the other Most Ancient House, had married half-bloods and muggleborns with no regard for the purity of their blood until about ten generations ago. Urquhart was older, and Malfoy too, but the latter hardly counted, seeing as they had run off to France and come back, and who _knew_ what they got up to on the Continent? All the others of Burke’s so-called Sacred Twenty-Eight were less than four-hundred years old.

The point was, it was a minor miracle that the Potters hadn’t died out already. But _every_ generation for the past _twenty-five_ generations had managed to create an heir. Even James’ father had managed it, and James was _pretty sure_ Charlus had ‘kept for the other team’ as his mother would have put it. James couldn’t imagine being the Last Potter, seeing his family die out under his watch, like so many others had in this thrice-cursed War. (As Moony liked to say, M. de Mort was the worst thing ever to happen to pureblood supremacy. By the time he was done with them, there’d be no purebloods left.)

James was determined to do this Lord Potter thing right if it killed him, which included naming his Heir properly, like his father and grandfather and the last ten or more before him. _Potter_ was the most important name, of course, but that the first and middle names should also follow tradition was almost as much so. He was obviously quite willing to behave irrationally about this – up to refusing to speak to his pregnant wife for three whole days.

The son, the first-born son, at _least_ , had to be named after a king of England. It was considered good luck, to name the one who was to rule the Family in his turn after a successful ruler. And the son’s middle name should be the father’s first because, like the Druids, the Potters believed in acknowledging the continuity between parent and child. (A daughter’s middle name should be that of her mother, but James had been more willing to compromise on the name of a daughter who would be less likely to inherit, especially since Mary was the child’s maternal grandmother’s name, too.)

There were families who named their heirs after the mother’s family. The Cavendishes and Moores came to mind. But that simply wasn’t how it was done with the Potters.

James had offered every compromise he could think of, from allowing Evan to be the name of their _second_ -born to adding a second middle name to letting Lily name a girl anything she wanted. But all his extremely hormonal, extremely pissed-off wife had heard was that her input and her family were less valued than his. She had even played the ‘this is because I’m muggleborn’ card. And the worst part was, he couldn’t even tell her she was wrong. It was just a fact: he would never break from Potter tradition if he could help it.

He understood why Sirius had broken with the Blacks, but the fact of the matter was, _James_ was not a Blood Traitor, and he would feel like one if he started casually overturning centuries of tradition.

Some things, like political affiliations, were meant to shift, as needed, and others, like the holidays they celebrated, could be compromised upon. (The Potters had been Progressive long enough that it had become traditional, and James liked Christmas, though Lily, contrarily enough, celebrated Yule, complete with giving him the silent treatment all day on the Winter Solstice and bullying Sirius into sharing the Black Family Rituals.) But yet other things, like naming traditions, or the way an Heir was raised, or the First Magic celebration or the Marriage Ritual – the things that really defined a family – they weren’t up for debate.

That was probably something they should have talked about more before the wedding. But for some reason, James hadn’t really considered that it would be a problem. In the world he grew up in, if the Head of the Family made a decision, everyone else accepted it. Even if taking care of children day-to-day was generally the job of the Lady of the House, he should still have had the final word on things like names and discipline and the child’s introduction to magic and society.

Two months – two months and a few days, anyway – probably hadn’t really been enough time to prepare for a life together. The solicitors and goblins had managed to finalize the marriage contract in that time, though, and Lily had memorized the bonding ritual, and if it wasn’t done at midsummer, they’d have to wait another full year, and with their lives the way they were, they could be _dead_ by then. Now. Could have been. And instead they were about to have a child.

Yes, they were in hiding for the child’s safety, and yes, there was some horrible prophecy afoot, of which Dumbledore refused to tell them all the details, ‘for their own safety’ (honestly, James was starting to see where some of Lily’s frustration with the man came from). And Lily was spending all her time, when she wasn’t actively preparing for the baby to arrive or arguing with him over stupid things researching protective spells and wards and rituals.

But despite all that, James was _thrilled_ (and terrified). He was going to be a father. All he had to do was convince his wife to let him do it the _right_ way, and he was sure, everything would work out.

He knew what he had to do. He gathered his resolve and strode from the study to find his witch and make her understand, once and for all:

It really wasn’t about the name.


End file.
